An archive of the catastrophe : the unused footage of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah / Jennifer Cazenave.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cazenave, Jennifer, author.

Series:

SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shoah (Motion picture).

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (354 pages)

Place of Publication:

Albany, New York : State University of New York Press, 2019.

Summary:

"Claude Lanzmann's 1985 magnum opus Shoah is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust--and in film history. Over twelve years, Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, which he condensed into a nine-and-a-half-hour film. The unused footage was scattered and inaccessible for years before it was restored and digitized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In An Archive of the Catastrophe, Jennifer Cazenave presents the first comprehensive study of this collection. She argues that the outtakes pose a major challenge to the representational and theoretical paradigms produced by the documentary, while offering new meanings of Shoah and of Holocaust testimony writ large. They lend new insight into issues raised by the film, including questions of resistance, rescue, refugees, and above all gender--interviews with women make up a mere ten minutes of the finished documentary. As a rare instance of outtakes preserved during the predigital era of cinema, the unused footage of Shoah challenges us to establish a new critical framework for understanding how documentaries are constructed and reshapes the way we view this key Holocaust film"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: the making of the Shoah archive

The formation of a paradigm

Recasting 1961: Shoah and the Eichmann trial

Off-frame: trauma and the feminine

The question of rescue and refugees

Conclusion: the deep time of testimony.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781438474786

1438474784